Cloutier, Roger

ORAL HISTORY OF ROGER CLOUTIER
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
February 3, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is February the 3rd, 2011 and I am talking with Roger Cloutier here in Oak Ridge. Mr. Cloutier, tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family, where you went to school.
Mr. Cloutier: I was born in North Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1930. I went to school in North Attleboro and then went in the military and then went to the University of Massachusetts and then on to the University of Rochester.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me something about your family when you were growing up. Did you have any brothers or sisters? What did your mom and dad do?
Mr. Cloutier: My father was in the jewelry business where they make jewelry and my mother raised thirteen kids.
Mr. McDaniel: Thirteen kids. So you had twelve brothers and sisters.
Mr. Cloutier: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: What was that like?
Mr. Cloutier: Well the older ones were very old by the time I came along because I’m almost near the end and therefore they’ve grown up and moved out of the house. That of course made room available so that you no longer had to share a bed with somebody else.
Mr. McDaniel: So there was never a time when all thirteen kids were at the house at the same time, was there?
Mr. Cloutier: Probably not.
Mr. McDaniel: That would have been a little crowded wouldn’t it?
Mr. Cloutier: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: So your dad made jewelry. He was in the jewelry business, made jewelry.
Mr. Cloutier: He made jewelry. North Attleboro was famous for the jewelry business. Way back, Evans Case made all the cigarette cases that you’d see in movies and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: Balfour made class rings.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I think they still make class rings, don’t they? So was your up – well with thirteen kids, I’m sure you didn’t have any money. Were you middle class? Were you kind of upper class?
Mr. Cloutier: Middle class, I would say. Yeah. My father managed to keep a job all through the Depression.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh is that right? Okay. So you graduated from high school. You went to high school. What was it like growing up there in that part of the country? Did you live in the city or out in the country?
Mr. Cloutier: It’s a small town, probably at that time twelve thousand people.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. But what was it like growing up?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, of course, World War II started in 1941, and at that time I was in high school I guess, or junior high school. So most of the men had left the community to go in the service, including my brothers. Jobs were readily available for kids, so I worked at a number of jobs that in today’s world wouldn’t be allowed for kids that age.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do? Tell me a little bit about it.
Mr. Cloutier: Well I worked on farms. I worked in shoe repair. I worked almost anyplace you can think of.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. That was while you were going to school, I imagine.
Mr. Cloutier: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: How many hours a week did you work when you were, let’s say, high school? Did you work, what, ten, twenty, thirty?
Mr. Cloutier: Probably. After school would get out, you’d work until seven o’clock at night. Not unlike what kids do today for McDonald’s and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Okay, so you graduated high school and then you went to college.
Mr. Cloutier: No. I went directly into the Navy.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, you did? Okay, so you went to – so when you finished high school that was about what, ’47?
Mr. Cloutier: 1948.
Mr. McDaniel: ’48. You went into the Navy.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. At that time, President Truman was about to go and initiate the mandatory draft and everyone, all males would have to go into the service and I – just before they passed it, I went into the Navy.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about your Navy days. How long were you in and where did you go?
Mr. Cloutier: Well I was in there four years because President Truman extended my three year appointment. I was put on destroyers and then when the Korean War started out, I was quickly shipped over to Korea and got there within, oh, probably two weeks of when it started.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: So I was over there most of my – rest of my duty till I got out of the service.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you involved in action, I mean, combat action?
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. When I got there, we had to go and try to keep the North Koreans from taking over Pusan, and at that point McArthur decided to land at Incheon so we moved up to Incheon and we did all kinds of things off the shore.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do in the Navy? What was your job?
Mr. Cloutier: I was in Combat Information Center, mostly radar.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, all right. So you got out of the Navy in, what, ’52?
Mr. Cloutier: I got out in ’52.
Mr. McDaniel: ’52. Then you went to college?
Mr. Cloutier: Then I went to the University of Massachusetts.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you study there?
Mr. Cloutier: Well I started out in Agriculture and switched to Physics.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Then after that did you go ahead and go to graduate school?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, let me take a stop in between because at the University of Massachusetts, I got an appointment to go to Brookhaven National Laboratory for a summer appointment. When I was at Brookhaven National Laboratory – which is similar to Oak Ridge National Laboratory – but I heard about a program that would allow me to go to graduate school. So when I finished up at the University the following year, I then went on to the University of Rochester under a fellowship program that the Department of Energy had – well Atomic Energy Commission at that point – but it was administered by Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Brookhaven is where?
Mr. Cloutier: It’s on Long Island. It’s at Camp – what is that – Camp Upton which had been turned over to Brookhaven and it also is an associated university just like ORINS is an associated university.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you went in to the program that was a part of the ORINS Program, is that correct?
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. There was an AEC Fellowship Program in health physics or radiological physics, as they called it, at that point, and it was aimed at getting you a Master’s degree. There were similar programs at Vanderbilt University and elsewhere in the country.
Mr. McDaniel: So did you come to Oak Ridge to do that work?
Mr. Cloutier: No, it was done at the University of Rochester with the summer appointment, once again, back to Brookhaven.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh okay. So did you – so once you got your Master’s degree what did you do at that point?
Mr. Cloutier: I went to work for Westinghouse Commercial Atomic Power Division.
Mr. McDaniel: Where was that?
Mr. Cloutier: Just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay. What did you do for them?
Mr. Cloutier: Well I was in Industrial Hygiene and Health Physics. So I was concerned about whatever they were doing and they were at that point building the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Reactor and also working on the Pennsylvania Advance Reactor, which was a breeder reactor. It was never constructed.
Mr. McDaniel: This was, what, mid to late ’50s?
Mr. Cloutier: It was late – ’56, ’57.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. ’56, ’57. So how long did you stay with Westinghouse?
Mr. Cloutier: Probably two and a half years, I think it was.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Well before we get to that, now, tell me about your family. Did you – were you married at this time or did you start having children or –
Mr. Cloutier: I got married between my junior and senior year at the University of Massachusetts. My wife was a student there, but she was a year ahead of me. In fact our honeymoon was our trip to Brookhaven the first time in Upton, New York – or Camp Upton or Brookhaven National Lab is way out in the boonies at that time. So we were out there without any automobile or anything else.
Mr. McDaniel: That was your honeymoon.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. We a year later had a son, and at Rochester, we then had a daughter, and when we got to Pittsburgh, we had another daughter. So that was three of them. When ORINS put out a notice that they needed a health physicist I thought about it and decided that we’d come down and take a look at the Oak Ridge job.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: So I’ll finish up the family, because in Oak Ridge we then had two more kids.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh okay. So you ended up with five children?
Mr. Cloutier: Five children.
Mr. McDaniel: So when did you come to Oak Ridge? What year was that?
Mr. Cloutier: I came in ’59.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. You went to work for ORINS?
Mr. Cloutier: I went to work for ORINS. I’ll tell a little story.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: I came down because I thought I owed the AEC and ORINS something because of my fellowship. When I came down, I talked to various people. Allow me to back up just a little.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: When I worked at Westinghouse there were several people there that were from Oak Ridge. There was a fellow named Arnold Kitzes, who incidentally his wife wrote the story for the 25th Anniversary of Oak Ridge. You may know about that big play that they put on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, A Thousand Suns.
Mr. Cloutier: A Thousand Suns. So she had written along with someone else whose name escapes me at the moment.
Mr. McDaniel: It was – what was her name? I interviewed her. She passed away here the last couple of years.
Mr. Cloutier: Well the woman who wrote the lyrics, Osborne –
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, Betty Osborne.
Mr. Cloutier: She wrote the lyrics for it. In any case, because Arnold Kitzes was there, a fellow named Herb Krieger and a fellow named Harold Garber had all come up from Oak Ridge. As soon as they learned I was coming to Oak Ridge, they all wanted to pat me on the back because they said, “Oh you’re going to Oak Ridge. Don’t ever leave Oak Ridge.” So then they asked me who I was going to work for. So I told them Dr. Pollard. They all said, “Wonderful.” Herb Krieger – yeah, I’m trying to keep people’s names straight.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. Cloutier: He said, “Well, who else?” and I told him Marshall Brucer who headed up the medical division at ORINS. He said, “Don’t take the job.” So that was my first inkling that some people didn’t like Marshall Brucer. But I’ll say it right now, people either liked him or they hated him. He had just those two sides. I must say, I learned to love him because he was a very brilliant man and clever and everything else. He was a satirist and he could satire anybody if he wanted to. So in any case, those people convinced me that Oak Ridge was a good place to come. Now I have to say, I came down to Oak Ridge to be interviewed and I was assigned somebody to take me all over town and the young lady who took me around town, she would say something and I couldn’t understand her because she spoke with a Southern drawl that was predominant then. I would say something and she couldn’t understand me because I spoke with the Boston drawl. So as we spent the whole day together going from place to place, we hardly communicated at all because we couldn’t really talk to each other and understand.
Mr. McDaniel: You couldn’t understand each other.
Mr. Cloutier: But on that trip, I never got to meet Dr. Pollard. I just got to meet Dr. Brucer, Ralph Holverman and several other people and so on. But there was a concern I had at that point because one of the reasons I was coming down was that the Y-12 criticality accident had happened in ’58 and ORINS had taken care of the people who had been exposed. I was coming down to kind of assist in the Health Physics business that was going on. But there was another thing, and that was in ’58, is when the bombing occurred up in Clinton and that was nationwide news. So the question was: should I come down here with a family into an area in the South that was having bombings nearby?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let’s stop for just a real quick second.
Mr. Cloutier: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: I want to adjust something and then we’ll continue on.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: So when you came down to visit, you had said that kind of the impetus for some of your work was the criticality accident, and that was in ’58.
Mr. Cloutier: That was in ’58.
Mr. McDaniel: That was in ’58. Then, of course, in ’58 too was the bombing of Clinton High School. So you were a little concerned about bringing your family to an area that had that. What made you make up your mind one way or the other and what did your wife think?
Mr. Cloutier: We thought that Oak Ridge would be a nicer place to live as opposed to living in Pittsburgh, which at that time was cleaner than it had been before, but it was still a dirty place because if you put sheets up on a clothesline, they’d be spotted with dust and dirt and soot.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? That was due to just the pollution of the city or particular industry, steel industry?
Mr. Cloutier: Steel was still – there was still some steel mills but there was also a lot of coal being burnt in houses and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you made up the decision to come to Oak Ridge and you came in ’58?
Mr. Cloutier: We came in ’59.
Mr. McDaniel: ’59, okay.
Mr. Cloutier: We were fortunate that somebody had arranged for us to have a house up in East Village. When we arrived here it was a relatively new house because those East Village houses had been built – oh, I don’t know – one or two years before.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, ’56, ’57, something like that I think.
Mr. Cloutier: Everybody was bragging about the houses that they had just purchased in Oak Ridge because people were buying houses at low prices and buying lots at low prices.
Mr. McDaniel: That was about the time of the disposition, the act of Congress which allowed people to buy their houses, many which had been renting them since the war, I guess, and bought them relatively inexpensively.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. So everybody seemed to be happy. There were lots of things going on in town. The communities, the smallest communities, like Elm Grove and East Village and so on, had stores and so you went to [the] neighborhood store. But there was always something going on. I can think of going to things at the library, which was opposite the Alexander Inn. There was always something going on in the hall next to it and so on. So it was a fun city.
Mr. McDaniel: A fun city. Lots of things to do for you and the family I guess?
Mr. Cloutier: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess good opportunities for the kids to be involved in things?
Mr. Cloutier: There was Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, all the usual things.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I imagine even though Oak Ridge was populated with, as we say, outsiders, people who came in from all over the country, I imagine the way of life was different here than it was where you had been before as far as maybe the pace. Was it different?
Mr. Cloutier: Well it was different in the sense there were more community activities going on. In fact if two people got together, there was a club formed automatically. So it didn’t matter what the subject was. That’s all you needed were two people.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I understand [there were] lots of clubs in Oak Ridge in the early days. Okay, so you moved here in ’59 and you got a house in East Village. Then you said the next few years you had two more children and you and your wife were involved, and family, in activities in Oak Ridge. Let’s move into your work a little bit. Tell me a little bit about what you were doing when you first came here and kind of what you did throughout your career.
Mr. Cloutier: Well when I arrived I was working directly for Dr. Pollard, but you may recall I hadn’t met him yet. So on one Wednesday after I had been here about two weeks somebody said, “Oh you’ve not met Dr. Pollard yet. Come with me.” So off we went to his office. When I walked in, I was kind of shocked because there was a man standing there with a Roman collar like the Catholic priests wear. It took me a while to find out that he was an Episcopalian priest. On Wednesday he also conducted services. But I wasn’t sure at that point what I had managed to get myself into. So I met him and then learned to go and work alongside him with no troubles at all. But my principle job was to institute a radiation safety program, or I should augment it, the one that was already in place at ORINS, and to go and prepare for different things that were going on. So that was the beginning of the job. There was a division called a Special Training Division that trained people from all over the United States and all over the world. So I very soon became involved in the training that was going on there and worked with Ralph Holverman and Larry Akers and several others that were involved with international and national training. Simply because I’m talking about them now, I’ll continue. They quickly instituted a mobile laboratory program that sent people all over the United States to visit colleges and put on programs. Later on they got involved in the Atoms in Action program. In that program, I travelled all over Central and South America on trips to train Latin Americans on the safe use of radioactive materials. It was similar to the training programs done in the States, done at a special training, but much shorter so it was more intense.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me ask – let’s stop right here. Let me ask you a question. Now this was being done through the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Science or ORINS. Now was ORAU, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, had it been formed yet?
Mr. Cloutier: Oh, they were formed. ORINS was formed in 1946. It was formed primarily by Dr. Pollard and Kathryn Way who were UT professors. They formed it in order to have a way for people, especially scientists in the South to make use of some of the new equipment like nuclear reactors and so on that had come along. So in ’46, the AEC decided that they would support it. Now at about the same time they also created the University Resident Graduate Program which is part of UT, and its principle reason was to keep people from having to travel from Oak Ridge to Knoxville because the roads were not very good then. So the Resident Graduate Program was part of the Special Training Division. During the day it was Special Training. At night it became the UT Resident Graduate Program. At the same time, DOE established several medical divisions in the United States and the ORINS Medical Division was established in ’47, I believe.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But Oak Ridge Associated Universities was separate from ORINS or did it – is that correct?
Mr. Cloutier: ORINS was Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Cloutier: That’s ORINS.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s ORINS, right.
Mr. Cloutier: Which later became ORAU.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, that’s what I was getting to. It later became ORAU.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah, I’ll tell you about that later.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. You’ll talk about that. So when you came and you were working, you were revamping the Health Safety Program. What were some of the things you were involved in specifically or some of the people or some of the stories that you have from that?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, Medical Division – I’ll go back to the Medical Division. Nuclear medicine really didn’t exist at that time. There were some places that did a little, but the Medical Division was also involved in training doctors on how to safely use radioactive materials. So they had a program that brought people in from all over the United States, medical people. They also brought in international people, primarily from Japan and other places, to learn nuclear medicine. Dr. Brucer was instrumental in setting up the Nuclear Medicine Society. Radiotherapy – you notice I can keep going on this but –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Radiotherapy was growing because cobalt 60 had become available, and up to that time, all the X-ray machines could only produce low energy X-rays, or relatively low, whereas cobalt 60 was a very high energy gamma ray. It allows greater penetration, and therefore you can treat tumors better. So one of the very first units that Brucer helped design along with people from St. Louis DeBon’s Hospital was a unit that projected the radiation from various directions automatically. Today it’s the common thing but at that point it was quite new.
Mr. McDaniel: Just stop for just a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: So you were talking about the new X-ray process that had been designed. Now, did you work on that?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, I immediately started to work on the safety aspects of it and then get involved in more than that. The Medical Division continuing with radiation from external sources already had a facility called METBI, Medium Exposure Rate Total Body Irradiator, which was used to go and treat patients who had blood disorders. It’s pretty commonly known that the blood system is pretty sensitive to radiation and those people with blood disorders sometimes benefitted from whole body irradiation. Local radiation was commonly used for tumors that were in fixed positions but this was extended out to the whole body. I soon became involved with a staff member, Pat Dalton, Patricia, and we designed the LETBI facility, which is Low Exposure Rate Total Body Irradiator, which was actually a – what amounted to a Holiday Inn room sitting in the middle of a large shielded place, which a patient would move in and live there for up to a week leaving only to go to the bathroom and so on. So we were involved with the dosimetry involved with patients that were being radiated.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me ask you a question about that specifically, just curious. Was it a constant radiation exposure or was it on and off for a certain amount of time?
Mr. Cloutier: In the LETBI facility, it was on all the time except for the short period of time they left to go to the bathroom.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. What about their food and their meals?
Mr. Cloutier: They would come to the door and pick up their meals, which somebody brought down the maze and put it outside the door. So the idea was that it would be constant low level radiation. The argument is a simple one that the rate at which you administer the radiation changes the outcome, and low exposure was thought that it was going to allow larger doses to be given but spread out and therefore would affect the blood disorder more.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you were involved in designing that.
Mr. Cloutier: We did. Pat Dalton and I designed it.
Mr. McDaniel: Now when was that? About what year was that when that began?
Mr. Cloutier: I’m going to say late ’60s but I can’t remember for sure.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was thinking. It was probably the late ’60s, as I recall, that that’s when it was. Tell me something. I’ve always – I’ve never been really explained. I know a lot of folks even today who are health physicists. They call themselves the health physicists. Now what exactly does a health physicist do?
Mr. Cloutier: Well –
Mr. McDaniel: Because that’s what you were when you came.
Mr. Cloutier: I have to go back to radiation when it was discovered.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: I have to go way back there, but it didn’t take long for somebody to discover that radiation can do damage. Okay? So you then go and have to keep up some concern about avoiding the damage and there’s all kinds of little things that can be done to avoid the damage. In the 1920s and ’30s, there was a group of radium dial painters – that’s what they finally get called – but these were people who – young ladies – who would sit and take a paint brush that would dip into a material that would give off phosphorescence, but the way the phosphorescent material became lighted was they had radium in it, and the radium would give off an alpha particle and the alpha particle gave up its energy to the phosphorescent material, and it would glow in the dark.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: Now, it became very useful to have this in airplanes where the pilot needed to see his dials at night. So they would go and paint these things, but they also had the nasty habit of pointing their brushes in their mouth, and they swallowed the radium and they ended up with problems with their jaws and bones and so on. So given those two issues, internal exposure and external exposure, the Atomic Energy Commission knew they had to do something about all these new radioactive materials they were going to have if they succeeded in building a reactor. Okay? So they set up a group in Chicago headed by Dr. Stone. He brought together a bunch of people, mostly physicists and a few doctors and so on, to worry about this problem. So they had to choose a name for themselves. They finally decided that since it was on the health side and physics side because the physics was a measuring of the radiation with instruments and so on, they chose the name Health Physics. There’s an argument whether it should have been ‘radiation protection,’ but it became Health Physics.
Mr. McDaniel: So basically, you deal with all the physical aspects, all the health aspects of radiation.
Mr. Cloutier: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: Preventing it, measuring it, treat – I mean I guess even involved in what you do after someone is exposed? So all those aspects.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. Not everybody is involved, not all health physicists are involved in all phases of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I understand.
Mr. Cloutier: But there were people in all [phases].
Mr. McDaniel: I imagine there are a lot of health physicists because there’s a lot of work in radiation going on, always has been I guess since World War II.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. World War II with the reactor just expanded the number of radioactive materials that are available with the reactor.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well you were involved in I guess a lot of research weren’t you, I mean as far as coming up with new ideas to do things? And I guess that was one of ORINS’ biggest things that it did was doing new things.
Mr. Cloutier: Well that was a job and was set up by the Atomic Energy Commission to find new diagnostic and therapeutic uses of radioactive materials. So one of these groups, that Medical Division, was developing new radioactive materials, a fellow named Ray Hayes. He and his group came up with different radioactive materials and different chemical compounds they could attach to radioactive materials, too. Along the way, they had been studying gallium 68 because it’s a fission product and there was going to be gallium 68 around. It was a bone seeker. In the process of studying it, they finally came up with the fact that it would go to tumors and also to places where there was an inflammation. They actually chose the isotope 67 of gallium to do that study and it was kind of a serendipitous discovery. Somebody just paying attention to what they were doing all of a sudden discovered that what was going on – which was not unlike what happened with Röntgen because Röntgen, who discovered X-rays, just accidentally recognized that they were there.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: So in any case, the Medical Division did that. The Medical Division also irradiated people at one time. Childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia was a disease that killed kids very quickly. Today, St. Jude’s Hospital I think is talking about eighty-five or ninety percent survival from the same disease. So the Medical Division – now I’ll take you back – the Medical Division also became involved in bone marrow transplants. Now it became important that we know more about the dosimetry. So I got involved with that phase of the bone marrow transplants.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, I would imagine looking back on your career, looking back on the work that you did it – at this point in your life, I imagine that would be very satisfying, feel like you really contributed something that would help people.
Mr. Cloutier: Well there’s a saying, “It was the best of times.” The second part of it, I don’t use.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: Because the best of times was I came along just as this whole business was getting started. AEC was spending lots of money to get work done. It was an opportunity to meet a lot of young researchers and so on. It was a great time to be in the business.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But I guess personally, I guess you probably feel some real personal satisfaction that you were able – that your work was able to directly help people.
Mr. Cloutier: Oh yeah. Well the Medical Division, because of the new radioactive materials and the training courses – we had to teach physicians how to do dosimetry. It wasn’t very long after we started teaching people how to do it, we were asked by the AEC and the Food and Drug Administration to set up an Internal Dose Information Center. So I had the good fortune to set up the Internal Dose Information Center, which also put on an international symposium. So we had people coming from all over the world to go and learn about dosimetry and so on. I want to mention that Evelyn Watson took that task over when I moved on into the Environment which is an entirely different part of my career.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s move on to that. Let’s talk about your work in the Environment.
Mr. Cloutier: Well –
Mr. McDaniel: If you need to stop and take a break, stand up, let me know. We can stop.
Mr. Cloutier: No, it’s all right. The Atomic Energy Commission was put out of business, and they knew the group was set up – I won’t bother you with the name of it because it didn’t last but about a year before the Department of Energy came along. But during that period of time, the emphasis shifted to energy and the environment. There were all kinds of interesting things happening here in Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge National Lab went out of existence and was Hollofield National Laboratory for a short period of time. Then finally they got their name back again. But during that period of time, emphasis shifted and you had to go and get involved with things like coal, fossil fuels, solar, wind and so on. So I moved over into programs that dealt with coal, and for a short period of time I became an expert in coal. I say that laughingly because it was really a matter of bringing people in who knew about coal. The National Lab was busy trying to do coal liquification. So everybody shifted their talents and so on. Now after a while, that emphasis kind of died out, for lack of a better word, but also an emphasis came along as to reviewing – let me get my thoughts together a moment.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right.
Mr. Cloutier: I had to – I was almost headed back to Medical Division. I didn’t want to do it.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Okay. Along that way, I think it was Admiral Watkins came along as head of the Department of Energy and he wanted to change things, change attitudes and so on. “We’re going to restructure how people think about things.” That then led some place along the way to Hazel O’Leary, who was the Department of Energy, and she wanted to look at misadministrations of radioactive materials or administrations of radioactive materials that may have occurred in the past. But they also had to focus on – what about the old DOE sites? So that now led to people becoming interested in what was happening at the DOE sites, the actually abandoned sites. So I helped establish a group at ORINS and someplace along the way, we changed our name to Oak Ridge Nuclear – ORAU? ORAU.
Mr. McDaniel: Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
Mr. Cloutier: I have to go and stop and think what the acronym is: Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: So we got involved in doing what was called Verification Surveys all over the United States. So we hired a number of young people and we taught them how to live in the winter by sending them to Buffalo, New York in the middle of winter to do surveys up there. We sent them to Puerto Rico and we sent them all over the place doing verification studies. Someplace along the way, the Y-12 release of mercury and some uranium got released and we were asked if we could go and do the measurements for that. So we set up a group to go and measure the mercury releases here in Oak Ridge partly because we were “the white hat people.” We were not part of the Lab, and therefore we could go and – Oak Ridge National Lab – and therefore we could go and make the measurements and they’d be trusted.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: Add in between there the State of Tennessee decided that it was time for them to get involved in operating or controlling what happened at the National Laboratories. So they decided that they would keep – inch their way into the National Lab. Today if you go to the National Lab you find out they have people right onsite in order to go and do close-up monitoring of what’s going on at the lab.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: So I got involved with that and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you got involved in that and you did verification studies, you and your team, verification studies.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. Originally it was verification and then it became broader and all kinds of things were done. When I say I was in charge, a fellow named Jim Berger who was probably the most practical health physicist I’ve ever hired, he then took over the actual supervision of the people and so on. Now that’s been replaced by other people and so on. But today, the program is still going on and there’s new techniques that are widely used in order to get things done.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let me ask you a question and you may want to go into this, you may not want to go into this; this is completely up to you.
Mr. Cloutier: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: One of the things that you set up was, I guess, during the O’Leary administration was this Verification Program of what had been done in the past at the sites, at the nuclear sites across the country, DOE sites. I guess one of the things that came out was the room that you were talking about. Am I incorrect? Is that one of the things that I guess she concentrated on and there was some questions about that?
Mr. Cloutier: No. They’re two different things and they’re separate.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Let me first finish up with the business of the room and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: The room was designed in order to treat patients. So that’s its principle mission and so on. O’Leary decided that she needed to look at something that had happened at a number of sites in Oak Ridge, administrations of plutonium. So I now have to tell you a little history. You may recall that Glenn Seaborg who ended up being one of the Secretaries of Energy, he discovered plutonium.
[Editor’s note: Seaborg was Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1961-1971, but he did not serve as a Secretary of Energy.]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: When he discovered it, there was a small smidgeon of it and that’s all there was. But when the War came along, the question was: are we going to separate natural uranium which has several isotopes, the principle ones being U-238 and U-235, and separate out the U-235 which was the only isotope useful in building a bomb? And that was done at Y-12 primarily, and then K-25 did the separation also. But it also was known that plutonium would fission. So when the Reactor was built in Oak Ridge, the Graphite Reactor, one of their jobs was to make plutonium. So plutonium turns out to be easier to separate than uranium 235 because it can be done chemically. So it was done initially at ORNL but then the entire Hanford Project was built to make plutonium.
Mr. McDaniel: If someone��s watching this that does not understand the process, real quick let’s kind of go through. What you do is you take for �� and correct me if I’m wrong – you take a uranium slug and you put it in the reactor and somehow you get plutonium out of that. Tell me how that – tell me what happens.
Mr. Cloutier: Well for the Graphite Reactor, they had to put the uranium into the reactor somehow.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Cloutier: So they put it in what people call the ‘slug,’ but it really doesn’t matter that it was in slug. What’s the key is that if you put uranium in a reactor and that uranium was about enriched to about five percent – I forget the exact amount – but enriched in uranium 235. Now, when the U-235 fissions, it makes neutrons, two neutrons, two-and-a-half neutrons per fission.
Mr. McDaniel: In other words when it reaches critical mass?
Mr. Cloutier: When you have enough uranium 235 together with the proper amount of moderator around it, it will go critical. At that point –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what you mean by ‘fissions’? That’s when it fissions?
Mr. Cloutier: That’s what it means. The uranium fissions: it splits in two pieces producing fission products and sends off two and a half neutrons on the average. Those neutrons in the Graphite Reactor get slowed down by means of the moderator. But then they are captured by the 238. So now we have uranium 238 that has a neutron which makes it uranium 239. Uranium 239 will decay just like usual radio isotopes decay until they finally get to plutonium 239.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay.
Mr. Cloutier: So now we have plutonium 239 mixed up with my 238 and a little 235, but we can separate the plutonium from the uranium chemically.
Mr. McDaniel: Chemically, right.
Mr. Cloutier: So now we have a way of getting plutonium, which is fissionable, to use in a bomb. That’s what Hanford was set up to do.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I’m glad we explained that real quick. But anyway you were talking about Seaborg.
Mr. Cloutier: Well he started out with just a little bit of plutonium and so we then shifted to a point where we’re making we’ll say large amounts of it and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, at Hanford.
Mr. Cloutier: Now in order to make it and to get the uranium and all these other things there are a number of sites that had worked with uranium: Buffalo, New York, because they had stored uranium up there. These sites had been “abandoned.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: Now the question is, “Are they safe?” So a FUSRAP program, Formerly Utilized ‘something’ Sites [Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program], was established and people would be sent up there to clean them up. In Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, they used to process uranium to in order to get to get the radium. This is prior to World War II. So there’s a Formerly Utilized Site because it had uranium and it has radium. So the group that I supervised and so on would send up to verify how clean they managed to get it and to make sure that everything that needed to be done had been done.
Mr. McDaniel: So we’re getting back to O’Leary and the second story on that.
Mr. Cloutier: The second story dealt with – and published and so on – but some people had been administered plutonium sometime near the end of the war. The question is: why? Well I can now take you to internal dosimetry, because if they had been administered plutonium, they had plutonium inside their body that’s internal. Okay? Now why did they do it? Well in order to set safety standards, somebody needed to know how it behaved inside the body. Mind you this is a new element and so on. So a decision was made back in the Manhattan Engineering District time – decided that, well, they would take small amounts of plutonium and administer it to patients who they expected to die.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Murphy’s Law says, “It’s not going to happen.” So some of them survived and so on. So then there was a big attempt to find out what was going on there. In Oak Ridge, somebody was administered plutonium, but it was done in the Manhattan Engineering District, not at ORINS or ORAU. So that then led to: let’s look at other cases. So they then started to look at nuclear medicine and so on. Then Oak Ridge – and it would take me all day if I were to try and do this properly.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand.
Mr. Cloutier: But there was an attempt to go and find out what was going on at Oak Ridge. Now, by that time Marshall Brucer had left and Bill Andrews had taken over and they had sent groups out, Congressional groups, in order to go and check on what was going on and whether or not informed consent had been given. When it was all over – and it’s all been published – when it was all over, the conclusion was that ORINS patients had given informed consent, but this gives me an excuse to say something about ORINS patients.
Mr. McDaniel: Go right ahead.
Mr. Cloutier: The Oak Ridger – Dick Smyser – would occasionally talk about the ORINS Hospital as though it were a cancer research hospital and that was only partially true because most of the patients we had were cancer patients, but there were cancer patients who had been sent to us because there was no diagnostic or no therapy available for them. So the goal was to find new things. Now most of the patients all signed consent forms, but most of them hoped that something would be found that would cure their disease. On the other hand, they also hoped that whatever that was found out might help somebody who came along behind them. I can tell you many times I talked to patients about, “I hope something good comes out of this.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. For them this was kind of their last hope, wasn’t it?
Mr. Cloutier: Well –
Mr. McDaniel: For many of them it was.
Mr. Cloutier: Their last hope came long before they came to ORINS in most cases because their doctor had essentially said, “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m going to refer you to ORINS and if they have a study that’s going on, they may be able to do something for you, but at least they may be able to learn something about the disease.”
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So anyway, all that was kind of put under the microscope then, the work that was done at ORINS during the O’Leary administration and that kind of big brouhaha over, “What have we done to our people?” type thing.
Mr. Cloutier: Well I wouldn’t use the word ‘brouhaha.’ I mean, the reason is somebody needs to look at almost everything you do in order to make sure you stay on the safe side. Now, I’m going to digress a little because I talked to my son who lives up near Boston just yesterday, and I kid him because I say, “You got any snow up there?” And he says, “Oh we have lots and lots and lots of snow.” I said, “What are you doing with it?” He says, “Well they don’t know what to do with it.” I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “They can’t put it in the ocean anymore.” I said, “What’s the reason?” He says, “Well the government laws say you can’t put the snow in the ocean because it may be contaminated.” I said, “Well wait a minute. If it’s onshore and it – finally spring comes and it melts it goes down into the sewer. That goes into the river. The river goes into the ocean.” He says, “They know that but they have this rule that says you can’t dump snow in the ocean.” So I now take you back to Oak Ridge at the time of the mercury scare. The city of Oak Ridge was cleaning out East Fork Poplar Creek in order to let the water flow freely. When they took the dirt out, they put it on trucks and they carried it to different places. They spread it at Robertsville Junior High School, some in front of the Jefferson – where there was a ditch there. But they also, if you wanted dirt in your front yard, they would deliver a load of dirt to your front yard. There was a dump load of dirt that was just deposited on Emory Valley area. When EPA became involved and EPA said, “You can’t touch that pile of dirt.” And we argued that you ought to pick it up and put it someplace else, but in order to move it, you’d need a special permit and they weren’t about to get a special permit. So what’s comparable to the snow in the ocean? When the rule catches up to you, you’re caught.
Mr. McDaniel: Well that’s an interesting analogy and an interesting story. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything – what are you doing nowadays? When did you retire and what have done since you retired? Tell me a little bit about your family now.
Mr. Cloutier: Can I go back to Civil Rights for the moment, only because somebody’s told me I’ve got to say something about it.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, sure.
Mr. Cloutier: I told you that when I got down here that the bombing had just occurred up in Clinton a year before. I also discovered that in Oak Ridge that the Scarboro community was isolated two miles away from the Oak Ridge community – discovered that while ORAU had some blacks in professional positions – Kathleen – I mean Nelson Stevens – Kathleen Stevens [was] his wife – was in a professional position – but there were others who had college degrees and were not – were doing low level jobs. There was also a woman named Sally McCaskill, whose job was to go and wash dishes in the laboratory. Now, she was a black woman as were Nelson Stevens and so on. Sally McCaskill opened up a study hall in her own home over in Scarboro and she asked me to go and – if I would be a mentor over there, and she asked several other people, lots of people in Oak Ridge. So we would go over to mentor students over in Scarboro. Now Sally later on died and there’s a Sally McCaskill scholarship fund today that sends kids to – through their first year, freshman year of college and so on. So there’s a kid, a woman who started a program from very low level that’s now still going on and still training people.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s amazing.
Mr. Cloutier: But I managed to get involved in several things involving civil defense and ended up as President of the Oak Ridge Community Relations Council. Because of that, I became a member of the Tennessee Human Resources Council and so on for a period of time. But Civil Rights is like a lot of other things. People come into it and they go out of it, come into it and go out of it. So I’m reluctant to name many people because there were periods of time when other people were involved. But there was a period of time when we had a campaign in Oak Ridge to open up not only restaurants, which was one of those periods of time when people go and say, “Well if he would open, I will open, but I won’t open unless he opens,” and everybody plays that game. When it came time for playing games with barbershops the Community Relations Council primarily through I believe Bill Busing, if my memory is good, came up with the idea that we would sell coupons to have enough money to commit the barber to take the chance of opening his shop. After that drive was put on, Ken’s Barbershop here in town, who had been involved for some time, agreed to open his shop. George Phipps who was from Scarboro community and I went up to that shop to get our hair cut on the day that we opened it. So there are lots of little things going on. But if you don’t look at Oak Ridge from the standpoint of other things that were going on in the community, you’ve missed out on a lot of exciting things.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly.
Mr. Cloutier: Now what am I doing now? I helped organize the Retirees Group for ORAU. I have a daughter who joined the Peace Corps and went to Costa Rica and runs a macadamia plantation and processing plant. My wife and I go to Costa Rica and we spend time down there, about three months every two years. I have a son in Boston who’s in computers. I have a daughter in Norris who’s adopted a child from Haiti. I have a daughter in Texas who’s involved in Multiple Sclerosis. She has it but she’s very heavily involved in raising money for them. A son in Florida who has raised three kids from Haiti, including one that had hydrocephalus. So keeping up with them. At the moment I’m learning all about cattle.
Mr. McDaniel: You’re learning all – tell – why are you learning all about cattle?
Mr. Cloutier: Because I’m – my son-in-law and daughter in Costa Rica raise cattle and when I was young I worked with cattle and so it’s time for me to learn what’s changed in the cattle business.
Mr. McDaniel: There you go. There you go. Well Mr. Cloutier I appreciate you being with us and thank you so much.
Mr. Cloutier: I hope you edit it greatly.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Let me – here, I’ll get that for you.
Mr. Cloutier: I’ll let you get it.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, I’ll get that for you.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF ROGER CLOUTIER
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
February 3, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is February the 3rd, 2011 and I am talking with Roger Cloutier here in Oak Ridge. Mr. Cloutier, tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family, where you went to school.
Mr. Cloutier: I was born in North Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1930. I went to school in North Attleboro and then went in the military and then went to the University of Massachusetts and then on to the University of Rochester.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me something about your family when you were growing up. Did you have any brothers or sisters? What did your mom and dad do?
Mr. Cloutier: My father was in the jewelry business where they make jewelry and my mother raised thirteen kids.
Mr. McDaniel: Thirteen kids. So you had twelve brothers and sisters.
Mr. Cloutier: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: What was that like?
Mr. Cloutier: Well the older ones were very old by the time I came along because I’m almost near the end and therefore they’ve grown up and moved out of the house. That of course made room available so that you no longer had to share a bed with somebody else.
Mr. McDaniel: So there was never a time when all thirteen kids were at the house at the same time, was there?
Mr. Cloutier: Probably not.
Mr. McDaniel: That would have been a little crowded wouldn’t it?
Mr. Cloutier: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: So your dad made jewelry. He was in the jewelry business, made jewelry.
Mr. Cloutier: He made jewelry. North Attleboro was famous for the jewelry business. Way back, Evans Case made all the cigarette cases that you’d see in movies and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: Balfour made class rings.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I think they still make class rings, don’t they? So was your up – well with thirteen kids, I’m sure you didn’t have any money. Were you middle class? Were you kind of upper class?
Mr. Cloutier: Middle class, I would say. Yeah. My father managed to keep a job all through the Depression.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh is that right? Okay. So you graduated from high school. You went to high school. What was it like growing up there in that part of the country? Did you live in the city or out in the country?
Mr. Cloutier: It’s a small town, probably at that time twelve thousand people.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. But what was it like growing up?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, of course, World War II started in 1941, and at that time I was in high school I guess, or junior high school. So most of the men had left the community to go in the service, including my brothers. Jobs were readily available for kids, so I worked at a number of jobs that in today’s world wouldn’t be allowed for kids that age.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do? Tell me a little bit about it.
Mr. Cloutier: Well I worked on farms. I worked in shoe repair. I worked almost anyplace you can think of.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. That was while you were going to school, I imagine.
Mr. Cloutier: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: How many hours a week did you work when you were, let’s say, high school? Did you work, what, ten, twenty, thirty?
Mr. Cloutier: Probably. After school would get out, you’d work until seven o’clock at night. Not unlike what kids do today for McDonald’s and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Okay, so you graduated high school and then you went to college.
Mr. Cloutier: No. I went directly into the Navy.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, you did? Okay, so you went to – so when you finished high school that was about what, ’47?
Mr. Cloutier: 1948.
Mr. McDaniel: ’48. You went into the Navy.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. At that time, President Truman was about to go and initiate the mandatory draft and everyone, all males would have to go into the service and I – just before they passed it, I went into the Navy.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about your Navy days. How long were you in and where did you go?
Mr. Cloutier: Well I was in there four years because President Truman extended my three year appointment. I was put on destroyers and then when the Korean War started out, I was quickly shipped over to Korea and got there within, oh, probably two weeks of when it started.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: So I was over there most of my – rest of my duty till I got out of the service.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you involved in action, I mean, combat action?
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. When I got there, we had to go and try to keep the North Koreans from taking over Pusan, and at that point McArthur decided to land at Incheon so we moved up to Incheon and we did all kinds of things off the shore.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do in the Navy? What was your job?
Mr. Cloutier: I was in Combat Information Center, mostly radar.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, all right. So you got out of the Navy in, what, ’52?
Mr. Cloutier: I got out in ’52.
Mr. McDaniel: ’52. Then you went to college?
Mr. Cloutier: Then I went to the University of Massachusetts.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you study there?
Mr. Cloutier: Well I started out in Agriculture and switched to Physics.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Then after that did you go ahead and go to graduate school?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, let me take a stop in between because at the University of Massachusetts, I got an appointment to go to Brookhaven National Laboratory for a summer appointment. When I was at Brookhaven National Laboratory – which is similar to Oak Ridge National Laboratory – but I heard about a program that would allow me to go to graduate school. So when I finished up at the University the following year, I then went on to the University of Rochester under a fellowship program that the Department of Energy had – well Atomic Energy Commission at that point – but it was administered by Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Brookhaven is where?
Mr. Cloutier: It’s on Long Island. It’s at Camp – what is that – Camp Upton which had been turned over to Brookhaven and it also is an associated university just like ORINS is an associated university.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you went in to the program that was a part of the ORINS Program, is that correct?
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. There was an AEC Fellowship Program in health physics or radiological physics, as they called it, at that point, and it was aimed at getting you a Master’s degree. There were similar programs at Vanderbilt University and elsewhere in the country.
Mr. McDaniel: So did you come to Oak Ridge to do that work?
Mr. Cloutier: No, it was done at the University of Rochester with the summer appointment, once again, back to Brookhaven.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh okay. So did you – so once you got your Master’s degree what did you do at that point?
Mr. Cloutier: I went to work for Westinghouse Commercial Atomic Power Division.
Mr. McDaniel: Where was that?
Mr. Cloutier: Just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay. What did you do for them?
Mr. Cloutier: Well I was in Industrial Hygiene and Health Physics. So I was concerned about whatever they were doing and they were at that point building the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Reactor and also working on the Pennsylvania Advance Reactor, which was a breeder reactor. It was never constructed.
Mr. McDaniel: This was, what, mid to late ’50s?
Mr. Cloutier: It was late – ’56, ’57.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. ’56, ’57. So how long did you stay with Westinghouse?
Mr. Cloutier: Probably two and a half years, I think it was.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Well before we get to that, now, tell me about your family. Did you – were you married at this time or did you start having children or –
Mr. Cloutier: I got married between my junior and senior year at the University of Massachusetts. My wife was a student there, but she was a year ahead of me. In fact our honeymoon was our trip to Brookhaven the first time in Upton, New York – or Camp Upton or Brookhaven National Lab is way out in the boonies at that time. So we were out there without any automobile or anything else.
Mr. McDaniel: That was your honeymoon.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. We a year later had a son, and at Rochester, we then had a daughter, and when we got to Pittsburgh, we had another daughter. So that was three of them. When ORINS put out a notice that they needed a health physicist I thought about it and decided that we’d come down and take a look at the Oak Ridge job.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: So I’ll finish up the family, because in Oak Ridge we then had two more kids.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh okay. So you ended up with five children?
Mr. Cloutier: Five children.
Mr. McDaniel: So when did you come to Oak Ridge? What year was that?
Mr. Cloutier: I came in ’59.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. You went to work for ORINS?
Mr. Cloutier: I went to work for ORINS. I’ll tell a little story.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: I came down because I thought I owed the AEC and ORINS something because of my fellowship. When I came down, I talked to various people. Allow me to back up just a little.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: When I worked at Westinghouse there were several people there that were from Oak Ridge. There was a fellow named Arnold Kitzes, who incidentally his wife wrote the story for the 25th Anniversary of Oak Ridge. You may know about that big play that they put on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, A Thousand Suns.
Mr. Cloutier: A Thousand Suns. So she had written along with someone else whose name escapes me at the moment.
Mr. McDaniel: It was – what was her name? I interviewed her. She passed away here the last couple of years.
Mr. Cloutier: Well the woman who wrote the lyrics, Osborne –
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, Betty Osborne.
Mr. Cloutier: She wrote the lyrics for it. In any case, because Arnold Kitzes was there, a fellow named Herb Krieger and a fellow named Harold Garber had all come up from Oak Ridge. As soon as they learned I was coming to Oak Ridge, they all wanted to pat me on the back because they said, “Oh you’re going to Oak Ridge. Don’t ever leave Oak Ridge.” So then they asked me who I was going to work for. So I told them Dr. Pollard. They all said, “Wonderful.” Herb Krieger – yeah, I’m trying to keep people’s names straight.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. Cloutier: He said, “Well, who else?” and I told him Marshall Brucer who headed up the medical division at ORINS. He said, “Don’t take the job.” So that was my first inkling that some people didn’t like Marshall Brucer. But I’ll say it right now, people either liked him or they hated him. He had just those two sides. I must say, I learned to love him because he was a very brilliant man and clever and everything else. He was a satirist and he could satire anybody if he wanted to. So in any case, those people convinced me that Oak Ridge was a good place to come. Now I have to say, I came down to Oak Ridge to be interviewed and I was assigned somebody to take me all over town and the young lady who took me around town, she would say something and I couldn’t understand her because she spoke with a Southern drawl that was predominant then. I would say something and she couldn’t understand me because I spoke with the Boston drawl. So as we spent the whole day together going from place to place, we hardly communicated at all because we couldn’t really talk to each other and understand.
Mr. McDaniel: You couldn’t understand each other.
Mr. Cloutier: But on that trip, I never got to meet Dr. Pollard. I just got to meet Dr. Brucer, Ralph Holverman and several other people and so on. But there was a concern I had at that point because one of the reasons I was coming down was that the Y-12 criticality accident had happened in ’58 and ORINS had taken care of the people who had been exposed. I was coming down to kind of assist in the Health Physics business that was going on. But there was another thing, and that was in ’58, is when the bombing occurred up in Clinton and that was nationwide news. So the question was: should I come down here with a family into an area in the South that was having bombings nearby?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let’s stop for just a real quick second.
Mr. Cloutier: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: I want to adjust something and then we’ll continue on.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: So when you came down to visit, you had said that kind of the impetus for some of your work was the criticality accident, and that was in ’58.
Mr. Cloutier: That was in ’58.
Mr. McDaniel: That was in ’58. Then, of course, in ’58 too was the bombing of Clinton High School. So you were a little concerned about bringing your family to an area that had that. What made you make up your mind one way or the other and what did your wife think?
Mr. Cloutier: We thought that Oak Ridge would be a nicer place to live as opposed to living in Pittsburgh, which at that time was cleaner than it had been before, but it was still a dirty place because if you put sheets up on a clothesline, they’d be spotted with dust and dirt and soot.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? That was due to just the pollution of the city or particular industry, steel industry?
Mr. Cloutier: Steel was still – there was still some steel mills but there was also a lot of coal being burnt in houses and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you made up the decision to come to Oak Ridge and you came in ’58?
Mr. Cloutier: We came in ’59.
Mr. McDaniel: ’59, okay.
Mr. Cloutier: We were fortunate that somebody had arranged for us to have a house up in East Village. When we arrived here it was a relatively new house because those East Village houses had been built – oh, I don’t know – one or two years before.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, ’56, ’57, something like that I think.
Mr. Cloutier: Everybody was bragging about the houses that they had just purchased in Oak Ridge because people were buying houses at low prices and buying lots at low prices.
Mr. McDaniel: That was about the time of the disposition, the act of Congress which allowed people to buy their houses, many which had been renting them since the war, I guess, and bought them relatively inexpensively.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. So everybody seemed to be happy. There were lots of things going on in town. The communities, the smallest communities, like Elm Grove and East Village and so on, had stores and so you went to [the] neighborhood store. But there was always something going on. I can think of going to things at the library, which was opposite the Alexander Inn. There was always something going on in the hall next to it and so on. So it was a fun city.
Mr. McDaniel: A fun city. Lots of things to do for you and the family I guess?
Mr. Cloutier: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess good opportunities for the kids to be involved in things?
Mr. Cloutier: There was Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, all the usual things.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I imagine even though Oak Ridge was populated with, as we say, outsiders, people who came in from all over the country, I imagine the way of life was different here than it was where you had been before as far as maybe the pace. Was it different?
Mr. Cloutier: Well it was different in the sense there were more community activities going on. In fact if two people got together, there was a club formed automatically. So it didn’t matter what the subject was. That’s all you needed were two people.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I understand [there were] lots of clubs in Oak Ridge in the early days. Okay, so you moved here in ’59 and you got a house in East Village. Then you said the next few years you had two more children and you and your wife were involved, and family, in activities in Oak Ridge. Let’s move into your work a little bit. Tell me a little bit about what you were doing when you first came here and kind of what you did throughout your career.
Mr. Cloutier: Well when I arrived I was working directly for Dr. Pollard, but you may recall I hadn’t met him yet. So on one Wednesday after I had been here about two weeks somebody said, “Oh you’ve not met Dr. Pollard yet. Come with me.” So off we went to his office. When I walked in, I was kind of shocked because there was a man standing there with a Roman collar like the Catholic priests wear. It took me a while to find out that he was an Episcopalian priest. On Wednesday he also conducted services. But I wasn’t sure at that point what I had managed to get myself into. So I met him and then learned to go and work alongside him with no troubles at all. But my principle job was to institute a radiation safety program, or I should augment it, the one that was already in place at ORINS, and to go and prepare for different things that were going on. So that was the beginning of the job. There was a division called a Special Training Division that trained people from all over the United States and all over the world. So I very soon became involved in the training that was going on there and worked with Ralph Holverman and Larry Akers and several others that were involved with international and national training. Simply because I’m talking about them now, I’ll continue. They quickly instituted a mobile laboratory program that sent people all over the United States to visit colleges and put on programs. Later on they got involved in the Atoms in Action program. In that program, I travelled all over Central and South America on trips to train Latin Americans on the safe use of radioactive materials. It was similar to the training programs done in the States, done at a special training, but much shorter so it was more intense.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me ask – let’s stop right here. Let me ask you a question. Now this was being done through the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Science or ORINS. Now was ORAU, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, had it been formed yet?
Mr. Cloutier: Oh, they were formed. ORINS was formed in 1946. It was formed primarily by Dr. Pollard and Kathryn Way who were UT professors. They formed it in order to have a way for people, especially scientists in the South to make use of some of the new equipment like nuclear reactors and so on that had come along. So in ’46, the AEC decided that they would support it. Now at about the same time they also created the University Resident Graduate Program which is part of UT, and its principle reason was to keep people from having to travel from Oak Ridge to Knoxville because the roads were not very good then. So the Resident Graduate Program was part of the Special Training Division. During the day it was Special Training. At night it became the UT Resident Graduate Program. At the same time, DOE established several medical divisions in the United States and the ORINS Medical Division was established in ’47, I believe.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But Oak Ridge Associated Universities was separate from ORINS or did it – is that correct?
Mr. Cloutier: ORINS was Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Cloutier: That’s ORINS.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s ORINS, right.
Mr. Cloutier: Which later became ORAU.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, that’s what I was getting to. It later became ORAU.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah, I’ll tell you about that later.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. You’ll talk about that. So when you came and you were working, you were revamping the Health Safety Program. What were some of the things you were involved in specifically or some of the people or some of the stories that you have from that?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, Medical Division – I’ll go back to the Medical Division. Nuclear medicine really didn’t exist at that time. There were some places that did a little, but the Medical Division was also involved in training doctors on how to safely use radioactive materials. So they had a program that brought people in from all over the United States, medical people. They also brought in international people, primarily from Japan and other places, to learn nuclear medicine. Dr. Brucer was instrumental in setting up the Nuclear Medicine Society. Radiotherapy – you notice I can keep going on this but –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Radiotherapy was growing because cobalt 60 had become available, and up to that time, all the X-ray machines could only produce low energy X-rays, or relatively low, whereas cobalt 60 was a very high energy gamma ray. It allows greater penetration, and therefore you can treat tumors better. So one of the very first units that Brucer helped design along with people from St. Louis DeBon’s Hospital was a unit that projected the radiation from various directions automatically. Today it’s the common thing but at that point it was quite new.
Mr. McDaniel: Just stop for just a second.
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Mr. McDaniel: So you were talking about the new X-ray process that had been designed. Now, did you work on that?
Mr. Cloutier: Well, I immediately started to work on the safety aspects of it and then get involved in more than that. The Medical Division continuing with radiation from external sources already had a facility called METBI, Medium Exposure Rate Total Body Irradiator, which was used to go and treat patients who had blood disorders. It’s pretty commonly known that the blood system is pretty sensitive to radiation and those people with blood disorders sometimes benefitted from whole body irradiation. Local radiation was commonly used for tumors that were in fixed positions but this was extended out to the whole body. I soon became involved with a staff member, Pat Dalton, Patricia, and we designed the LETBI facility, which is Low Exposure Rate Total Body Irradiator, which was actually a – what amounted to a Holiday Inn room sitting in the middle of a large shielded place, which a patient would move in and live there for up to a week leaving only to go to the bathroom and so on. So we were involved with the dosimetry involved with patients that were being radiated.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me ask you a question about that specifically, just curious. Was it a constant radiation exposure or was it on and off for a certain amount of time?
Mr. Cloutier: In the LETBI facility, it was on all the time except for the short period of time they left to go to the bathroom.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. What about their food and their meals?
Mr. Cloutier: They would come to the door and pick up their meals, which somebody brought down the maze and put it outside the door. So the idea was that it would be constant low level radiation. The argument is a simple one that the rate at which you administer the radiation changes the outcome, and low exposure was thought that it was going to allow larger doses to be given but spread out and therefore would affect the blood disorder more.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So you were involved in designing that.
Mr. Cloutier: We did. Pat Dalton and I designed it.
Mr. McDaniel: Now when was that? About what year was that when that began?
Mr. Cloutier: I’m going to say late ’60s but I can’t remember for sure.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was thinking. It was probably the late ’60s, as I recall, that that’s when it was. Tell me something. I’ve always – I’ve never been really explained. I know a lot of folks even today who are health physicists. They call themselves the health physicists. Now what exactly does a health physicist do?
Mr. Cloutier: Well –
Mr. McDaniel: Because that’s what you were when you came.
Mr. Cloutier: I have to go back to radiation when it was discovered.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: I have to go way back there, but it didn’t take long for somebody to discover that radiation can do damage. Okay? So you then go and have to keep up some concern about avoiding the damage and there’s all kinds of little things that can be done to avoid the damage. In the 1920s and ’30s, there was a group of radium dial painters – that’s what they finally get called – but these were people who – young ladies – who would sit and take a paint brush that would dip into a material that would give off phosphorescence, but the way the phosphorescent material became lighted was they had radium in it, and the radium would give off an alpha particle and the alpha particle gave up its energy to the phosphorescent material, and it would glow in the dark.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: Now, it became very useful to have this in airplanes where the pilot needed to see his dials at night. So they would go and paint these things, but they also had the nasty habit of pointing their brushes in their mouth, and they swallowed the radium and they ended up with problems with their jaws and bones and so on. So given those two issues, internal exposure and external exposure, the Atomic Energy Commission knew they had to do something about all these new radioactive materials they were going to have if they succeeded in building a reactor. Okay? So they set up a group in Chicago headed by Dr. Stone. He brought together a bunch of people, mostly physicists and a few doctors and so on, to worry about this problem. So they had to choose a name for themselves. They finally decided that since it was on the health side and physics side because the physics was a measuring of the radiation with instruments and so on, they chose the name Health Physics. There’s an argument whether it should have been ‘radiation protection,’ but it became Health Physics.
Mr. McDaniel: So basically, you deal with all the physical aspects, all the health aspects of radiation.
Mr. Cloutier: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: Preventing it, measuring it, treat – I mean I guess even involved in what you do after someone is exposed? So all those aspects.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. Not everybody is involved, not all health physicists are involved in all phases of it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I understand.
Mr. Cloutier: But there were people in all [phases].
Mr. McDaniel: I imagine there are a lot of health physicists because there’s a lot of work in radiation going on, always has been I guess since World War II.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. World War II with the reactor just expanded the number of radioactive materials that are available with the reactor.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well you were involved in I guess a lot of research weren’t you, I mean as far as coming up with new ideas to do things? And I guess that was one of ORINS’ biggest things that it did was doing new things.
Mr. Cloutier: Well that was a job and was set up by the Atomic Energy Commission to find new diagnostic and therapeutic uses of radioactive materials. So one of these groups, that Medical Division, was developing new radioactive materials, a fellow named Ray Hayes. He and his group came up with different radioactive materials and different chemical compounds they could attach to radioactive materials, too. Along the way, they had been studying gallium 68 because it’s a fission product and there was going to be gallium 68 around. It was a bone seeker. In the process of studying it, they finally came up with the fact that it would go to tumors and also to places where there was an inflammation. They actually chose the isotope 67 of gallium to do that study and it was kind of a serendipitous discovery. Somebody just paying attention to what they were doing all of a sudden discovered that what was going on – which was not unlike what happened with Röntgen because Röntgen, who discovered X-rays, just accidentally recognized that they were there.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: So in any case, the Medical Division did that. The Medical Division also irradiated people at one time. Childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia was a disease that killed kids very quickly. Today, St. Jude’s Hospital I think is talking about eighty-five or ninety percent survival from the same disease. So the Medical Division – now I’ll take you back – the Medical Division also became involved in bone marrow transplants. Now it became important that we know more about the dosimetry. So I got involved with that phase of the bone marrow transplants.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, I would imagine looking back on your career, looking back on the work that you did it – at this point in your life, I imagine that would be very satisfying, feel like you really contributed something that would help people.
Mr. Cloutier: Well there’s a saying, “It was the best of times.” The second part of it, I don’t use.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: Because the best of times was I came along just as this whole business was getting started. AEC was spending lots of money to get work done. It was an opportunity to meet a lot of young researchers and so on. It was a great time to be in the business.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But I guess personally, I guess you probably feel some real personal satisfaction that you were able – that your work was able to directly help people.
Mr. Cloutier: Oh yeah. Well the Medical Division, because of the new radioactive materials and the training courses – we had to teach physicians how to do dosimetry. It wasn’t very long after we started teaching people how to do it, we were asked by the AEC and the Food and Drug Administration to set up an Internal Dose Information Center. So I had the good fortune to set up the Internal Dose Information Center, which also put on an international symposium. So we had people coming from all over the world to go and learn about dosimetry and so on. I want to mention that Evelyn Watson took that task over when I moved on into the Environment which is an entirely different part of my career.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s move on to that. Let’s talk about your work in the Environment.
Mr. Cloutier: Well –
Mr. McDaniel: If you need to stop and take a break, stand up, let me know. We can stop.
Mr. Cloutier: No, it’s all right. The Atomic Energy Commission was put out of business, and they knew the group was set up – I won’t bother you with the name of it because it didn’t last but about a year before the Department of Energy came along. But during that period of time, the emphasis shifted to energy and the environment. There were all kinds of interesting things happening here in Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge National Lab went out of existence and was Hollofield National Laboratory for a short period of time. Then finally they got their name back again. But during that period of time, emphasis shifted and you had to go and get involved with things like coal, fossil fuels, solar, wind and so on. So I moved over into programs that dealt with coal, and for a short period of time I became an expert in coal. I say that laughingly because it was really a matter of bringing people in who knew about coal. The National Lab was busy trying to do coal liquification. So everybody shifted their talents and so on. Now after a while, that emphasis kind of died out, for lack of a better word, but also an emphasis came along as to reviewing – let me get my thoughts together a moment.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right.
Mr. Cloutier: I had to – I was almost headed back to Medical Division. I didn’t want to do it.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Okay. Along that way, I think it was Admiral Watkins came along as head of the Department of Energy and he wanted to change things, change attitudes and so on. “We’re going to restructure how people think about things.” That then led some place along the way to Hazel O’Leary, who was the Department of Energy, and she wanted to look at misadministrations of radioactive materials or administrations of radioactive materials that may have occurred in the past. But they also had to focus on – what about the old DOE sites? So that now led to people becoming interested in what was happening at the DOE sites, the actually abandoned sites. So I helped establish a group at ORINS and someplace along the way, we changed our name to Oak Ridge Nuclear – ORAU? ORAU.
Mr. McDaniel: Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
Mr. Cloutier: I have to go and stop and think what the acronym is: Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: So we got involved in doing what was called Verification Surveys all over the United States. So we hired a number of young people and we taught them how to live in the winter by sending them to Buffalo, New York in the middle of winter to do surveys up there. We sent them to Puerto Rico and we sent them all over the place doing verification studies. Someplace along the way, the Y-12 release of mercury and some uranium got released and we were asked if we could go and do the measurements for that. So we set up a group to go and measure the mercury releases here in Oak Ridge partly because we were “the white hat people.” We were not part of the Lab, and therefore we could go and – Oak Ridge National Lab – and therefore we could go and make the measurements and they’d be trusted.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: Add in between there the State of Tennessee decided that it was time for them to get involved in operating or controlling what happened at the National Laboratories. So they decided that they would keep – inch their way into the National Lab. Today if you go to the National Lab you find out they have people right onsite in order to go and do close-up monitoring of what’s going on at the lab.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: So I got involved with that and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you got involved in that and you did verification studies, you and your team, verification studies.
Mr. Cloutier: Yeah. Originally it was verification and then it became broader and all kinds of things were done. When I say I was in charge, a fellow named Jim Berger who was probably the most practical health physicist I’ve ever hired, he then took over the actual supervision of the people and so on. Now that’s been replaced by other people and so on. But today, the program is still going on and there’s new techniques that are widely used in order to get things done.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Let me ask you a question and you may want to go into this, you may not want to go into this; this is completely up to you.
Mr. Cloutier: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: One of the things that you set up was, I guess, during the O’Leary administration was this Verification Program of what had been done in the past at the sites, at the nuclear sites across the country, DOE sites. I guess one of the things that came out was the room that you were talking about. Am I incorrect? Is that one of the things that I guess she concentrated on and there was some questions about that?
Mr. Cloutier: No. They’re two different things and they’re separate.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Let me first finish up with the business of the room and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: The room was designed in order to treat patients. So that’s its principle mission and so on. O’Leary decided that she needed to look at something that had happened at a number of sites in Oak Ridge, administrations of plutonium. So I now have to tell you a little history. You may recall that Glenn Seaborg who ended up being one of the Secretaries of Energy, he discovered plutonium.
[Editor’s note: Seaborg was Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1961-1971, but he did not serve as a Secretary of Energy.]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Cloutier: When he discovered it, there was a small smidgeon of it and that’s all there was. But when the War came along, the question was: are we going to separate natural uranium which has several isotopes, the principle ones being U-238 and U-235, and separate out the U-235 which was the only isotope useful in building a bomb? And that was done at Y-12 primarily, and then K-25 did the separation also. But it also was known that plutonium would fission. So when the Reactor was built in Oak Ridge, the Graphite Reactor, one of their jobs was to make plutonium. So plutonium turns out to be easier to separate than uranium 235 because it can be done chemically. So it was done initially at ORNL but then the entire Hanford Project was built to make plutonium.
Mr. McDaniel: If someone��s watching this that does not understand the process, real quick let’s kind of go through. What you do is you take for �� and correct me if I’m wrong – you take a uranium slug and you put it in the reactor and somehow you get plutonium out of that. Tell me how that – tell me what happens.
Mr. Cloutier: Well for the Graphite Reactor, they had to put the uranium into the reactor somehow.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Cloutier: So they put it in what people call the ‘slug,’ but it really doesn’t matter that it was in slug. What’s the key is that if you put uranium in a reactor and that uranium was about enriched to about five percent – I forget the exact amount – but enriched in uranium 235. Now, when the U-235 fissions, it makes neutrons, two neutrons, two-and-a-half neutrons per fission.
Mr. McDaniel: In other words when it reaches critical mass?
Mr. Cloutier: When you have enough uranium 235 together with the proper amount of moderator around it, it will go critical. At that point –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what you mean by ‘fissions’? That’s when it fissions?
Mr. Cloutier: That’s what it means. The uranium fissions: it splits in two pieces producing fission products and sends off two and a half neutrons on the average. Those neutrons in the Graphite Reactor get slowed down by means of the moderator. But then they are captured by the 238. So now we have uranium 238 that has a neutron which makes it uranium 239. Uranium 239 will decay just like usual radio isotopes decay until they finally get to plutonium 239.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay.
Mr. Cloutier: So now we have plutonium 239 mixed up with my 238 and a little 235, but we can separate the plutonium from the uranium chemically.
Mr. McDaniel: Chemically, right.
Mr. Cloutier: So now we have a way of getting plutonium, which is fissionable, to use in a bomb. That’s what Hanford was set up to do.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I’m glad we explained that real quick. But anyway you were talking about Seaborg.
Mr. Cloutier: Well he started out with just a little bit of plutonium and so we then shifted to a point where we’re making we’ll say large amounts of it and so on.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, at Hanford.
Mr. Cloutier: Now in order to make it and to get the uranium and all these other things there are a number of sites that had worked with uranium: Buffalo, New York, because they had stored uranium up there. These sites had been “abandoned.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Cloutier: Now the question is, “Are they safe?” So a FUSRAP program, Formerly Utilized ‘something’ Sites [Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program], was established and people would be sent up there to clean them up. In Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, they used to process uranium to in order to get to get the radium. This is prior to World War II. So there’s a Formerly Utilized Site because it had uranium and it has radium. So the group that I supervised and so on would send up to verify how clean they managed to get it and to make sure that everything that needed to be done had been done.
Mr. McDaniel: So we’re getting back to O’Leary and the second story on that.
Mr. Cloutier: The second story dealt with – and published and so on – but some people had been administered plutonium sometime near the end of the war. The question is: why? Well I can now take you to internal dosimetry, because if they had been administered plutonium, they had plutonium inside their body that’s internal. Okay? Now why did they do it? Well in order to set safety standards, somebody needed to know how it behaved inside the body. Mind you this is a new element and so on. So a decision was made back in the Manhattan Engineering District time – decided that, well, they would take small amounts of plutonium and administer it to patients who they expected to die.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
Mr. Cloutier: Murphy’s Law says, “It’s not going to happen.” So some of them survived and so on. So then there was a big attempt to find out what was going on there. In Oak Ridge, somebody was administered plutonium, but it was done in the Manhattan Engineering District, not at ORINS or ORAU. So that then led to: let’s look at other cases. So they then started to look at nuclear medicine and so on. Then Oak Ridge – and it would take me all day if I were to try and do this properly.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand.
Mr. Cloutier: But there was an attempt to go and find out what was going on at Oak Ridge. Now, by that time Marshall Brucer had left and Bill Andrews had taken over and they had sent groups out, Congressional groups, in order to go and check on what was going on and whether or not informed consent had been given. When it was all over – and it’s all been published – when it was all over, the conclusion was that ORINS patients had given informed consent, but this gives me an excuse to say something about ORINS patients.
Mr. McDaniel: Go right ahead.
Mr. Cloutier: The Oak Ridger – Dick Smyser – would occasionally talk about the ORINS Hospital as though it were a cancer research hospital and that was only partially true because most of the patients we had were cancer patients, but there were cancer patients who had been sent to us because there was no diagnostic or no therapy available for them. So the goal was to find new things. Now most of the patients all signed consent forms, but most of them hoped that something would be found that would cure their disease. On the other hand, they also hoped that whatever that was found out might help somebody who came along behind them. I can tell you many times I talked to patients about, “I hope something good comes out of this.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. For them this was kind of their last hope, wasn’t it?
Mr. Cloutier: Well –
Mr. McDaniel: For many of them it was.
Mr. Cloutier: Their last hope came long before they came to ORINS in most cases because their doctor had essentially said, “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m going to refer you to ORINS and if they have a study that’s going on, they may be able to do something for you, but at least they may be able to learn something about the disease.”
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So anyway, all that was kind of put under the microscope then, the work that was done at ORINS during the O’Leary administration and that kind of big brouhaha over, “What have we done to our people?” type thing.
Mr. Cloutier: Well I wouldn’t use the word ‘brouhaha.’ I mean, the reason is somebody needs to look at almost everything you do in order to make sure you stay on the safe side. Now, I’m going to digress a little because I talked to my son who lives up near Boston just yesterday, and I kid him because I say, “You got any snow up there?” And he says, “Oh we have lots and lots and lots of snow.” I said, “What are you doing with it?” He says, “Well they don’t know what to do with it.” I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “They can’t put it in the ocean anymore.” I said, “What’s the reason?” He says, “Well the government laws say you can’t put the snow in the ocean because it may be contaminated.” I said, “Well wait a minute. If it’s onshore and it – finally spring comes and it melts it goes down into the sewer. That goes into the river. The river goes into the ocean.” He says, “They know that but they have this rule that says you can’t dump snow in the ocean.” So I now take you back to Oak Ridge at the time of the mercury scare. The city of Oak Ridge was cleaning out East Fork Poplar Creek in order to let the water flow freely. When they took the dirt out, they put it on trucks and they carried it to different places. They spread it at Robertsville Junior High School, some in front of the Jefferson – where there was a ditch there. But they also, if you wanted dirt in your front yard, they would deliver a load of dirt to your front yard. There was a dump load of dirt that was just deposited on Emory Valley area. When EPA became involved and EPA said, “You can’t touch that pile of dirt.” And we argued that you ought to pick it up and put it someplace else, but in order to move it, you’d need a special permit and they weren’t about to get a special permit. So what’s comparable to the snow in the ocean? When the rule catches up to you, you’re caught.
Mr. McDaniel: Well that’s an interesting analogy and an interesting story. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything – what are you doing nowadays? When did you retire and what have done since you retired? Tell me a little bit about your family now.
Mr. Cloutier: Can I go back to Civil Rights for the moment, only because somebody’s told me I’ve got to say something about it.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, sure.
Mr. Cloutier: I told you that when I got down here that the bombing had just occurred up in Clinton a year before. I also discovered that in Oak Ridge that the Scarboro community was isolated two miles away from the Oak Ridge community – discovered that while ORAU had some blacks in professional positions – Kathleen – I mean Nelson Stevens – Kathleen Stevens [was] his wife – was in a professional position – but there were others who had college degrees and were not – were doing low level jobs. There was also a woman named Sally McCaskill, whose job was to go and wash dishes in the laboratory. Now, she was a black woman as were Nelson Stevens and so on. Sally McCaskill opened up a study hall in her own home over in Scarboro and she asked me to go and – if I would be a mentor over there, and she asked several other people, lots of people in Oak Ridge. So we would go over to mentor students over in Scarboro. Now Sally later on died and there’s a Sally McCaskill scholarship fund today that sends kids to – through their first year, freshman year of college and so on. So there’s a kid, a woman who started a program from very low level that’s now still going on and still training people.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s amazing.
Mr. Cloutier: But I managed to get involved in several things involving civil defense and ended up as President of the Oak Ridge Community Relations Council. Because of that, I became a member of the Tennessee Human Resources Council and so on for a period of time. But Civil Rights is like a lot of other things. People come into it and they go out of it, come into it and go out of it. So I’m reluctant to name many people because there were periods of time when other people were involved. But there was a period of time when we had a campaign in Oak Ridge to open up not only restaurants, which was one of those periods of time when people go and say, “Well if he would open, I will open, but I won’t open unless he opens,” and everybody plays that game. When it came time for playing games with barbershops the Community Relations Council primarily through I believe Bill Busing, if my memory is good, came up with the idea that we would sell coupons to have enough money to commit the barber to take the chance of opening his shop. After that drive was put on, Ken’s Barbershop here in town, who had been involved for some time, agreed to open his shop. George Phipps who was from Scarboro community and I went up to that shop to get our hair cut on the day that we opened it. So there are lots of little things going on. But if you don’t look at Oak Ridge from the standpoint of other things that were going on in the community, you’ve missed out on a lot of exciting things.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly.
Mr. Cloutier: Now what am I doing now? I helped organize the Retirees Group for ORAU. I have a daughter who joined the Peace Corps and went to Costa Rica and runs a macadamia plantation and processing plant. My wife and I go to Costa Rica and we spend time down there, about three months every two years. I have a son in Boston who’s in computers. I have a daughter in Norris who’s adopted a child from Haiti. I have a daughter in Texas who’s involved in Multiple Sclerosis. She has it but she’s very heavily involved in raising money for them. A son in Florida who has raised three kids from Haiti, including one that had hydrocephalus. So keeping up with them. At the moment I’m learning all about cattle.
Mr. McDaniel: You’re learning all – tell – why are you learning all about cattle?
Mr. Cloutier: Because I’m – my son-in-law and daughter in Costa Rica raise cattle and when I was young I worked with cattle and so it’s time for me to learn what’s changed in the cattle business.
Mr. McDaniel: There you go. There you go. Well Mr. Cloutier I appreciate you being with us and thank you so much.
Mr. Cloutier: I hope you edit it greatly.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Let me – here, I’ll get that for you.
Mr. Cloutier: I’ll let you get it.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, I’ll get that for you.
[end of recording]